Oedipus Rex or was not was--everybody do the dinosaur!

The Sphinx challenged Oedipus on the road to Thebes with a riddle: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? Paleontologists have found themselves confronted puzzle, as New Scientist reports, and this is really mind-blowing and disabusing. Certain specimens that researchers have always held to be examples of different species may actually be the same animal at different stages of growth and development. If people did not have the experience of frogs and butterflies contemporarily, who would have thought to connect them to fossil evidence of tadpoles or caterpillars?

it's time to play the pyramid

I've think that a word cloud has been a good and accessible way to present a concept scatter-shot.  Maybe one's CV or résumé in the future could be in word cloud form, plastered here and there like the translucent advertizing film that they preserve mass-transit busses in.  I stumbled across a snazzy, aesthetic word cloud generator called Wordle quite by accident.  I pasted the text from the last two months of blog entries in it and it spun out this picture.  It's funny to see one's words parsed this way and what tags are tops.

flavor-fla

At the beginning of the month, voters in Bavaria moved to reject (I believe) the state's remaining vestiges of smokers' protections.  The act, Raucherschutz, was criticized in part because the measure had a misleading name--were voters endorsing protection for smokers' and smokers' rights or protection from smokers and the rights of nonsmokers.  The confusion in wording smacked of the criticism levied against the 2008 US state of California's ballot Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 sought to formally define the institution of marriage to exclude same-sex partnerships, so an affirmative vote for Proposition 8 was delivering a resounding no to marriage equality.  In both cases, lobbyists took advantage of this fact.  The Raucherschutz also passed, some believe because enough people misunderstood the message.  Mostly the new law dealt with schemes that bypassed fairly comprehensive EU smoking bans, like hookah bars or beer tents or beer tents inside of nominally non-smoking establishments.  The debate is still on, and a second vote may be pending, whether "members' only" clubs and renting a restaurant for completely private function are exempt.

alpengeist or keys to the kingdom

The town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the foot of the Zugspitze has been nominated once again to host the Winter Olympic Games. It did so once before in 1936. The planning and prom committees are of course excited and perhaps a little over enthusiastic, as the schematics were set forth, however, without first consulting local landowners, who are not eager to sacrifice their heritage for an Olympic media center. A lot of installations are already there in Garmisch, like the stadium, so I wonder what all needs to be built.

Now there is talk of re-appropriating some of the property the US military forces leases from the government of Bavaria as a ski resort for soldiers, like the golf course, for new Olympic facilities. Though positioned with pristine views of the mountains that rise up like surface of the moon, I have stayed at the "Edelweiss" and I don't think anyone should bemoan the loss of this government-run resort that is overpriced and preys on the uninitiated travellers' idea of fancy and does not nearly compare to the hospitality that locals offer.

In unrelated news, like the plot of some role-playing adventure quest, inventor of the Interwebs Al Gore, has vetted seven people across the Earth with electronic keys to restart the World Wide Web, I guess at a safe-point in case of catastrophic failure. It sounds as if these proponents were chosen for their propensity and life-force when it comes to the Legend of Zelda--pieces of the Triforce were scattered across the Land of Hyrule.